Saturday, 22 June 2013

Britain's spy agency GCHQ has tapped fibre-optic cables that carry international phone and internet traffic and is sharing vast quantities of personal information with the U.S. National Security Agency, the Guardian newspaper said on Friday.

Friday, 21 June 2013

China may be a long way from its “Minsky moment”. Rising leverage has prompted many to predict the kind of financial meltdown theorised by economist Hyman Minsky. But China’s closed, state-controlled system is well placed to postpone such market panics. The bigger challenge is managing social tensions arising from slowing growth.

When Chinese activist Chen Guangcheng arrived in the United States in May last year he was given a fellowship at New York University, use of a Greenwich Village apartment, and a pile of gifts from supporters, including smartphones and an iPad.

Thursday, 20 June 2013

A United Nations human rights body accused Israeli forces on Thursday of mistreating Palestinian children, including by torturing those in custody and using others as human shields.

Palestinian children in the Gaza and the West Bank, captured by Israel in the 1967 war, are routinely denied registration of their birth and access to health care, decent schools and clean water, the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child said.

"Palestinian children arrested by (Israeli) military and police are systematically subject to degrading treatment, and often to acts of torture, are interrogated in Hebrew, a language they did not understand, and sign confessions in Hebrew in order to be released," it said in a report.

Defiant and apparently unbowed by threats of prosecution, former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden vowed Monday to release more secrets about U.S. intelligence surveillance systems that he described as “nakedly, aggressively criminal.”

A new set of classified documents disclosed Sunday suggested that Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who has provided a trove of documents to The Guardian newspaper, had obtained a wider range of materials about government surveillance than had been known, including one document revealing how American and British intelligence agencies had eavesdropped on world leaders at conferences in London in 2009.

Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency leaker, is defending his disclosure of top-secret U.S. spying programs in an online chat Monday with The Guardian and attacking U.S. officials for calling him a traitor.

China’s official army newspaper on Sunday branded the United States Internet surveillance programme exposed by former spy Edward Snowden as “frightening”, and accused the US of being a “habitual offender” when it comes to network monitoring.

A few hundred rights advocates and political activists marched through Hong Kong on Saturday to demand protection for Edward Snowden, who leaked revelations of U.S. electronic surveillance and is now believed to be holed up in the former British colony.

Six Chinese oenology students were attacked in the early hours of Saturday in France's wine-producing southwest region of Bordeaux, the interior ministry said, describing the violence as an act of xenophobia.